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Exclusive: Cinema Eye Honors said that Eyes on the Prize, the landmark civil rights docuseries that first aired on public television in 1987, will receive the group’s 2019 Legacy Award. The honor will be bestowed January 10 during the 12th annual Cinema Eye Honors awards ceremony in New York.

“For me and so many others, Eyes on the Prize was a transformational cinematic experience, artfully crafting the history of a nation into an unforgettable story,” Cinema Eye board co-chair Dawn Porter said Thursday. “Countless filmmakers have been inspired by this elegant body of work.”

Created and by the late Henry Hampton’s Blackside, the 14-part Eyes on the Prize is considered the definitive documentary record of the American civil rights era, tracing the country’s long and brutal march toward equality and the fight to end decades of discrimination and segregation. It aired in two parts, the first covering the years 1954–1965 and...

The Cinema Eye Honors, which annually presents awards to “celebrate outstanding artistry and craft in nonfiction film,” has revealed its nominees in 10 categories, including Outstanding Nonfiction Feature and Outstanding Nonfiction Short. Multiple nominees include Robert Greene’s ​”Bisbee ‘17,” Sandi Tan’s “Shirkers,” and RaMell Ross’ ​”Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” with five nods each. While Greene is a Cinema Eye Honors vet, both Tan and Ross are first-time filmmakers.

Another first-time filmmaker on the rise: Bing Liu, whose autobiographical skateboarding doc “Minding the Gap,” leads the nominees with a total of seven nominations. That’s good enough to put the newbie filmmaker into rarefied territory, tying his film with lauded documentaries like Louie Psihoyos’ ​”The Cove​​,” Lixin Fan’s ​”Last Train Home​,”​ and Ari Folman’s “​Waltz With Bashir​​” for most Cinema Eye Honors nods ever. As Liu is a named nominee for six of those awards, he’s...

Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap,” an look at small-town American life through the lens of a group of skateboarder friends, led the 2018 Cinema Eye Honors nominations for nonfiction filmmaking Thursday.

The film, a Hulu original documentary, landed seven bids, for direction, editing, cinematography, original score, debut feature and the audience award, in addition to outstanding achievement in nonfiction feature filmmaking, the organization’s top prize. It was also mentioned in the “Unforgettables” sidebar honoring the subjects of many of this year’s documentaries.

The seven-nomination haul was enough to match Cinema Eye’s record, held by Louie Psihoyos’ “The Cove,” Lixin Fan’s “Last Train Home” and Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir.”

The other nominees for outstanding achievement in nonfiction feature filmmaking were “Bisbee ’17” (five nominations), “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” (five nominations), “Of Fathers and Sons” (three nominations), “Three Identical Strangers” (three nominations) and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?...

Awards season keeps ticking right along, but tonight’s Cinema Eye Honors promised at least a tiny respite from narrative-based filmmaking, as the New York City-set ceremony is all about honoring the best in the year’s documentary filmmaking.

Big winners included Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson,” which picked up Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking, along with editing and cinematography wins. Right behind it was Ezra Edelman’s “O.J.: Made in America,” which earned Edelman a directing win, along with a production win for Edelman and Caroline Waterlow. Best TV offering went to “Making a Murderer.”

Nominations were lead by Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” and “O.J.: Made in America,” which each pulled in five nominations apiece, though Johnson’s “Cameraperson” and Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea” aren’t far behind, with four nominations each. Both Peck and Rosi’s features ultimately walked away without an award.

The nominees for the 10th annual Cinema Eye Honors have been announced, with “I Am Not Your Negro” and “Oj: Made in America” both receiving five each. They’re followed in short order by “Cameraperson” and “Fire at Sea,” which along with “Weiner” are all in contention for the top prize. A total of 37 features and five shorts will be in contention at the upcoming ceremony, which “Hoop Dreams” director Steve James will host from the Museum of the Moving Image on January 11. Here’s the full list of nominees:

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking

“Cameraperson” (Kirsten Johnson)

“Fire at Sea” (Gianfranco Rosi)

“I Am Not Your Negro” (Raoul Peck)

“Oj: Made in America” (Ezra Edelman)

“Weiner” (Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg)

Outstanding Achievement in Direction

Kirsten Johnson, “Cameraperson”

Gianfranco Rosi, “Fire at Sea”

Raoul Peck, “I Am Not Your Negro”

Robert Greene, “Kate Plays Christine”

Ezra Edelman, “Oj:...

Documentary cinema is in the middle of an evolutionary moment. Filmmakers are beginning to experiment not only with style, but with structure and story, making it both one of the most exciting moments in non-fiction cinema history and also one of the most boundary pushing. Be it the blend of fact with fiction or the sensory-focused aesthetic and story structure that seems to be the newest trend, documentary film is a world that has been routinely giving cinephiles some of the most exciting work.

And it’s no different with the first film from distribution label Cinema Slate, I Touched All Your Stuff.

From directors Maria Buhler and Matias Mariani comes this story of a man by the name of Chris Kirk, a former Michigander who turned drug smuggler in a story that you wouldn’t believe if he told it to you. Doing exactly that, however, the two directors...

“It all started with the hippos.” That’s the kind of sentence that usually suggests a whimsical journey of self discovery, but in this instance it’s the introduction to what happens when adjectives like “picaresque” are combined with “completely full of it”. I Touched All Your Stuff concerns the bizarre, true story of Oregonian Chris Kirk, a con artist who became intrigued by the hippos living on the former compound of deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar, and ended up in…...

Who gets thanked the most in Oscar acceptance speeches? Nathaniel Rogers and Chris Kirk crunch the numbers from the last decade's worth of ceremonies, and have made some interesting discoveries -- chief among them, that Meryl Streep gets thanked more often than God. "What comes out in the moment—or doesn’t—is a true reflection of feeling, whether the speech feels rehearsed and polished or immediate and spazzy. And in Hollywood—and what’s more Hollywood than the Oscars?—billing matters," they write. Included is an exhaustive cross-referenced chart breaking down individuals actors' speech by class of person thanked, and in what order. Geek out. [Slate] This year's Tribeca Film Festival will open with Nas documentary "Time is Illmatic." [Screen Daily] Louis Peitzman rounds up the least favorable reviews of this year's Best Picture nominees (including mine of "Nebraska" and "Philomena," though I was okay with the latter). [BuzzFeed] Tim Gray anticipates the...

click image above to enlarge Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I find myself lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, and thinking about completely geeky things like “how long would it take the Enterprise to get to Alpha Centauri from Earth? Would that be faster or slower than the Millennium Falcon?” Clearly, this is a sign that I need a life, or at least sleeping pills. However, it turns out that I’m not alone in wondering about these things – Chris Kirk over at Slate spends a lot of time thinking about the same things. The difference? He didn’t just think about it instead of counting sheep – he made a cool interactive chart that shows just how fast some of sci-fi’s most famous ships are and how long it would take them to...

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With "Moulin Rouge" director Baz Luhrmann's pop dramatic adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" in theaters this week, what better way to revisit the themes of F. Scott Fitzgerald jazz-era novel than with an 8-bit rowing game.

Slate's Chris Kirk, Andrew Morgan, and Forrest Wickman are responsible for "The Great Gatsby: The Video Game," whose very literary/literal punchline is, lacking for a better word "cute."

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Acceptance speeches reveal the deepest recesses of the actor's mind. I love them – particularly when the hairdresser is thanked

Many critics find Oscar acceptance speeches disturbing on account of their insincerity. As a fan of the form, I say: nonsense. Anyone who thinks you can get up on stage at the Dolby Theater in front of 40 million people, take an atomic blast of approval from a select audience of your peers, and then fake your response, is very much mistaken. It peels you like an onion.

Gone is the phalanx of publicists, the glazed interview demeanor, the self-protective instincts born of a thousand paparazzo intrusions; and in its place the quick stumble of inarticulacy, the pink flush of pure need, as the star gulps down all the love and acceptance they stand revealed to have craved all along. It's understandably disturbing: we are used to wanting and desiring them, not them needing us.